> someone can be a technical leader with significant impact, without having a large number of direct or indirect reports.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
In my (limited) knowledge of Carmack, he is both a craftsman and a businessperson... he founded several companies and was the CTO of Oculus for a while. Hard to imagine there not being direct or indirect reports in that case.
In either case, he's definitely better known as a thought leader and rockstar developer rather than an effective executive, I suppose. I think he left Meta in part because he couldn't really get past all the red tape and move the company where he thought Oculus needed to go.
